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Every now and then I find that my user interfaces would benefit from a little animation. Mostly those are some kind of loading animations, but sometimes process illustrations as well, and others. But, while for still pictures and icons there are the superb Paint.NET and Pixelformer, I have yet to see a good tool for creating and editing animated GIFs. Most just allow to splash together a bunch of files and specify delays between them, but even a simple operation like cropping is way beyond them (unless I want to export all frames, crop each one individually, and then reassemble). Is there perhaps some good tool that I've missed?

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I've just done a search for "animated gif editor" and Google has returned lots of results. I feel that this question is unanswerable in it's current form. – ChrisF Dec 18 '10 at 21:24
@ChrisF - try some of those links. 90% are commercial software. The rest are crap. In fact, I've even tried some of that commercial software, and it was pretty bad. – Vilx- Dec 18 '10 at 23:27
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@Charles Boyung Animated GIFs should not be avoided at all costs. They should be used sparingly and thoughtfully. The have their place and use. No reason to loop a number of PNGs to create a "loading" icon when an animated GIF is perfectly suited (given that you can do without the alpha channel). – jensgram Dec 20 '10 at 7:42
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@Charles Boyung - indeed, I would like to use something more contemporary, but, alas - MNG never caught on (they even removed it from Firefox to reduce codebase size!), and there is no other option for animations save Flash (which is an overkill by far). – Vilx- Dec 20 '10 at 8:47
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Oh, and also javascript-based animations (Canvas/SVG/silverlight/whatever), which is something different than I had in mind (a simple animated picture). – Vilx- Dec 20 '10 at 8:53
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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

The Gimp is a free tool that allows for animated gifs.

Simple Animations

I use animated gifs sparingly and strategically. In the comments it says never to use them and that is completely incorrect. They are a tool like any other, use appropriately.

Examples: Animated loading gifs, icons that may blink to show some special status. They can also be used to draw subtle attention to a specific area of the screen without resorting to heavier methods.

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+1 for good points. The GIMP, however, is not what I would call a "good" GIF editor. It is, sadly though, better than anything else I've tried :-S – jensgram Dec 20 '10 at 7:44
Indeed. I've tried GIMP myself a couple of times and was completely lost. :P – Vilx- Dec 20 '10 at 8:44
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Free and good don't always play nice. :) – Glen Lipka Dec 21 '10 at 15:13
+1 for loading icons: it alleviates user frustration while they wait and makes the application perceived more responsive than without a loading indicator. – wildpeaks Dec 22 '10 at 18:31
@Glen: What isn't good about Gimp for this purpose? All an animated GIF editor really needs is the ability to add key frames and automatically "tween" the animation. Gimp seems to do this just fine. – Lèse majesté Dec 24 '10 at 3:34
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up vote 1 down vote

The GIMP is OK. Not sure if there really is a great open source/free option. For commercial apps, Fireworks is great at creating and maintaining animated gifs.

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up vote 1 down vote

I'd suggest the free Paint.NET tool with this plugin.
To install that plugin (in particular), copy the two folders from the archive to your Paint.NET installation directory (overwriting existing files, of course).
Paint.NET is the most user friendly image editor I know, but GIMP has many more features.

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You added a link to a direct download of a zip file. How about a link to a website describing the download, and maybe a description here? – Steve Mitcham Mar 29 '11 at 12:16
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up vote 0 down vote

Anything that is good for creating and editing animations should do - animated GIFs are nothing but animations after all. Blender can be used as a half-decent video editing suite and can of course also create content.

Any 2D animation package would also work though I'm not sure if there're any decent free ones. Adobe After Effects and Adobe Flash comes to mind on the commercial side for pixel-based versus mostly vector-based animation (and yes, I mean using Flash as a content creation tool and exporting it to an animated GIF (or a series of stills for further processing in another tool)).

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